On her Wednesday blog post, The Trainwreck, Kristine Kathryn Rusch laid out her vision for just how bad COVID will get for traditional publishing and the next steps she recommends for authors working with that business model.
Her prognosis is fairly dire: traditional publishing is in grave danger, and likely won’t really understand how grave for months after the pandemic is over. It’s also touched with a longstanding, negative around agents and traditional publishing practices that runs through Rusch’s non-fiction work. Not necessarily a reason to avoid reading it, but something to be aware of before you go in and maybe treat this is as a useful data point rather than a gospel advice for what to do next.
I don’t know that I see quite the level of gloom that Rusch does for traditional publishing, but I do see an awful lot of bad coming down the pipe. More importantly, I see a space where lots of business assumptions will end up being questioned and new stuff will be tried.
Which is half the reason I find myself writing things like the scratchpad series about publishing and comics, trying to pull apart my own assumptions about publishing, and figure out opportunities that are being overlooked.
